


If You Were Here

by Catchclaw



Category: Thor (Movies)
Genre: Angst, First Time, M/M, Memories, Schmoop, Thor: Ragnarok (2017)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-21
Updated: 2017-11-21
Packaged: 2019-02-05 06:29:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,570
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12788799
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Catchclaw/pseuds/Catchclaw
Summary: After the destruction of Asgard, a hug: then and now.





	If You Were Here

“If you were here,” Thor says, snap crackle sarcastic, “I might even hug you.”

Then there’s an object between them, flying, and in the moment between now and then, Loki cannot help but remember the first time his brother put his arms around him. Not as a child, but as a man.

He’d been full in his cups, of course. Drunk to the point of sincerity. And yet somehow, even in such a state, he’d managed to take Loki wholly by surprise.

Loki closes his eyes for a hair’s breadth, and sees.  
  


****

  
The first time Thor hugged him, he’d barged into Loki’s chamber unannounced; bullied his way past the locks and caught Loki in his arms, unawares.

“Brother!” he’d said. “There you are.”

He was jubilant, redolent of mead and their mother’s spiced candles, a great warm bear whose whiskers were just beginning to scratch, and in his arms, Loki thought fleetingly of a struggle; there was a spell on the cliff of his tongue. But his brother’s grip only tightened, squeezing out any protest, any last bit of breath and it seemed easier to surrender, to wind his arms around those straining shoulders and wait for Thor to discover his good sense again.  
  
“You weren’t at my party,” Thor said. 

“What?” 

Thor tucked his cheek against Loki’s, his skin a living flame. “Mother told me you weren’t there, everyone did, but I didn’t believe them. I told them you had to be.”

Loki bit back a sigh. Was that what all this was about? His brother had recently returned from his first (heavily chaperoned) campaign unscathed, triumphant, an event which occasioned a celebration, one that required the Great Hall full to bursting with slapped shoulders and shouts and far, far too much drunken singing. The embodied antithesis of how Loki liked to spend an evening, if he had any choice.

He squirmed. “I told you I wasn’t coming. Several times. This morning, even.”

Thor shook his head as if it were Loki speaking nonsensically, not he. “No, no,” he said. “I looked all over everywhere, Loki,  _every_ , and I couldn’t find you.”

“Yes,” Loki said, exasperated, “of course you couldn’t. Because I wasn’t there. I was here.”

Thor acted as if he hadn’t heard. “It’s cold in here.” He balled his fists in Loki’s night tunic. “Mmmm. You’re cold." 

“I banked the fire, idiot. I was trying to sleep.” He gave Thor a little shove. “Which is what you’d be doing if you had any sense. You smell like you’ve been swimming in mead.”

“Swimming?” Thor laughed, a great hiccup of noise that rang around the chamber. “No, brother. I’ve been drinking!”

Loki patted his back. “Yes, yes, and well done. I’m sure everyone was suitably impressed at your ability to tip back a glass.”

Thor made a low, hurt sound, and all at once he was not so much clinging as clutching, as if he were adrift and Loki the only land left in sight. “Pffft,” he said, sullen. “You weren’t there. You don’t know what I did.” He ducked his head and mashed his mouth against Loki’s throat, breathed: “I wish that you’d come.”

“I told you--” Loki started to say again, fruitless, for there was lightning under his chin, a kiss that smelled of fire come too close.

“I wish,” his brother said again, words Loki this time could taste because Thor was kissing him, not fierce and sloppy but warm and undeniably sweet.

 _I can get away from him_ , Loki thought.  _I can let go, summon a spell--I can make him release me, I can._  

And yet it was as if his body had a mind of its own for he found his lips parting, found his fingers weaving love knots in Thor’s hair as his brother cupped the small of his back. It burned, that touch, singed his skin through the rough gossamer fabric, held him fast against Thor’s war leathers, long sewn and newly tested. Here they were, he thought: a god dressed for battle, the other for dreams, colliding somewhere in between.

He stroked Thor’s tongue with his own, daring, and then their kisses were not so soft, nor so careful; then his brother’s hands spread, took in as much territory as they could. One found the trail edge of his tunic and crept beneath it, dragging blunt fingers up his thigh, cresting them on his hip. He gasped and his brother laughed, their mouths flush.

“You like that, do you?”

“Mmmm.” He hitched his hips and brushed against Thor’s arousal. “As do you.”

A sigh, a sound like a feather. “Oh, yes.”

Thor kissed him again, quick and fevered, and he yearned for his bed, for the swim of its shimmer sheets, the promise of his brother spread across them. He could feel the magic in him stirring, the itch of a spell that would free them both of clothing and shove them skin to skin, yes, but the thoughts refused to take hold, they couldn’t, not with his brother’s nails in his neck, easy talons, the other teasing towards his cock.

“Why are you here?” Thor murmured. “Why are you always here and not there, where I need you?”

Loki shivered. “You don’t need me. You have brothers-in-arms a plenty, do you not? All those who drank with you tonight.”

“I don’t mean that.” Thor’s voice was gentle, fallen leaves on the path. “I’d never ask you to fight. That’s my purpose, my burden. Not yours.” He turned his fingers around Loki’s cock, a rough bridle, stroking. “How does that feel? Does that please you?" 

Loki’s head filled with stars, blue and red and gold, and soon it seemed all of creation had dimmed in light of his brother’s touch. He was joyfully blinded.

“Please,” he said after a time; an instant, eternity. “Take me to bed.”

“No,” Thor said, a stone in a still pond. “Come like this.”

Loki was a reed in a hurricane, his spine bent to fierce wind, but he did not topple even as the ache in him grew, a flash fire of need. “Thor--”

His brother hushed him, as if he were a child again in need of solace. “Shhhh. Do this for me, Loki.”

“Please--!”

Thor’s mouth at his ear, his voice solid and sure. “Spill yourself on me so next time I fight, I will remember why I must come home alive.”

Sweet words, sweet, and there was no shame in it, then, how quickly Loki gave in, how soon his pleasure overtook the last of his sense and he lost himself on Thor’s leathers, snow white on tanned flesh.

Thor nuzzled Loki’s throat, as if reveling in the pound of his breath, the beat of his blood. “Thank you,” he murmured once and again, even as Loki shot the clasp of his  _skyrta_ and bared him to the air. “Thank you.”

The great heavy weight of his cock lifted to Loki’s hand, shuddered, as eager as Loki’s own had been, and when Loki brought him release, no reed in the breeze was he, but a tower with its foundations undone. He roared, a choked lion, and tumbled to his knees, tugging Loki down after.

They lay in a heap for a moment, folded together on the hearthrug, one their mother had long ago made, before Odin's palace held any children.

When he could, Loki sat up a stretch and waved a hand at the hearth. As the fire stirred, he held Thor’s head in his lap and stroked his fingers through his brother’s hair, through Thor’s memories of this first battle now past.

“You were frightened,” Loki said.

Thor stirred and closed a hand around Loki’s knee. “I was. I did not expect to be.”

A flash of Odin’s sword, the collision of goldsteel and enemy flesh. “You didn’t want Father to know it.”

A snort. “Of course not.”

“But you acted bravely, did you not? Even you believe that to be so.”

“Perhaps. But it was blind bravery, brother. There was no skill in it.”

“Not today, perhaps. But one day there will be. One day you will act bravely because of your fear, not in spite of it.”

Thor turned his head and smiled up at him. “Will I?”

Loki touched his face, drew his knuckles down his brother’s ridiculous beard. “Of that I have no doubt.”

 

****

There is so much room between then and now that it’s difficult to believe that same boy lives still somewhere in Thor, his brother: a shorn god, one stripped of his kingdom and his curls in one fell swoop. Loki has watched him bleed, has held the knife, has fought at his side, has hovered in the shadows at his back. They have saved worlds and destroyed them, lost their mother, their father, slapped one another in chains. Now they have no home, not even the dignity of a destination, and yet it’s to this they return: the promise, however pointed, of an embrace.

Loki folds open his eyes and snatches the silver weight from the sky, stops its momentum with curled fingers, the palm of his hand.

“I’m here,” he says. 

The air around them trembles and there is lightning in Thor’s eye, behind his smile. “I know, brother,” he says, stretching a hand across the years, reaching out to the boy that lives somewhere in Loki, still. “I know.”


End file.
